In a typical atrial fibrillation procedure, the conduction velocity (CV) of an electrical impulse is an important parameter that can provide information to the clinician about the state of the tissue being ablated.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,711,439, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes how modern implantable cardiac stimulation devices include processing and data storage capabilities that may be exploited to track myocardial condition and autonomic tone.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,301,496, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method of diagnosing an abnormal condition in a biological structure, such as the heart, including the steps of measuring a physiological response at at least three sampled points on a surface of the biological structure, calculating a vector function related to the response, displaying a representation of the vector function, and inferring the abnormal condition from the representation.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,236,883, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a method comprising the steps of identifying and localizing reentrant circuits from electrogram features using feature detection and localization (FDL) algorithms.
U.S. Pat. No. 8,880,160, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a system which comprises a cardiac signal sensing and a processing circuit. The cardiac signal sensing circuit senses a first cardiac signal segment that includes a QRS complex and a second cardiac signal segment that includes a fiducial indicative of local ventricular activation.
U.S. Patent Application 2011/0137369, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes an exemplary method for optimizing pacing configuration. The method includes providing distances between electrodes of a series of three or more ventricular electrodes associated with a ventricle and selecting a ventricular electrode from the series.
U.S. Pat. No. 9,186,081, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes a system for diagnosing arrhythmias and directing catheter therapies. The system may allow for measuring, classifying, analyzing, and mapping spatial electrophysiological (EP) patterns within a body.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,663,622, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes devices and a method which are provided to assist a surgeon in ablating conduction paths in tissue, such as a heart. A device can be configured to operate as a template that adheres to the tissue surface, and allows the surgeon to more easily sever the conduction path to form a lesion in a desired location.
Commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 9,380,953, which is incorporated herein by reference, describes how a bipolar electrogram and a unipolar electrogram are recorded from electrodes of a probe, and differentiated with respect to time. Peaks are identified in the differentiated bipolar electrogram, and an activity window is defined that includes bipolar activity about the peaks. An extreme negative value in the differentiated unipolar electrogram within the activity window is reported as a unipolar activation onset. An annotation is selected from candidate minima in the differentiated unipolar electrogram within the activity window by excluding candidates that fail to correlate with activity in the bipolar electrogram.
Documents incorporated by reference in the present patent application are to be considered an integral part of the application except that, to the extent that any terms are defined in these incorporated documents in a manner that conflicts with definitions made explicitly or implicitly in the present specification, only the definitions in the present specification should be considered.